I have that article in an old Clymer repair manual.....it is a great read. I imagine someone will link to it. Your BE probably wasn't 10 years old and probably stock engined I imagine. I had some harrowing experiences as well but then most people advised me not to go to Tijuana!
Kurt
I bought the car in March of '68, and it was already quite tired by then. Being a Motor City car, it had some rust issues, the engine was tired, usual chipped and noisy first gear, brakes were shot and I don't think I had it a month when the axle broke starting off gently from a stop light (got that lesson early). Being my first car and not having a lot of tools or experience, I paid a shop to fix the brakes and rear axle, but not having a lot of money meant I was going to have to learn fast. I bought a shop manual (which I still have) from the local BMC dealer (Falvey Motors on Woodward Avenue), and got busy over the next year reconditioning the car. I had to hire out machine work of course, but rebuilt the engine and gearbox myself. It was a stock 948, but I did use some performance parts like flat top pistons, and I'm sure a cam and a high performance oil pump, but I don't remember what else. I had the car repainted, and did some other repair work. I'm proud to say that I drove the car over 8,000 miles by the time I returned to Detroit after my trip without any failures, save an issue of being rear ended in San Francisco's Chinatown right before the last leg of my journey home. The shop that did the R&R in SF to replace the clutch managed to fracture one of the fittings on the oil cooler line, which I did not figure out until I was somewhere in Nebraska. I went from not burning a drop of oil to spraying out copious amounts over the miles until that point. I managed to correct it by luckily finding the right fitting in a truck stop and being able to borrow an EZ-out, but that was my only incident.
That was the first engine and gearbox I ever built, so thinking back, it's pretty amazing I got away with it all.